Zeo Brings Sleep Science Out of the Lab, Into Your Home

Are you getting a good nights sleep? In our harried lives, full of technology and staying up late playing WoW, a proper nights sleep may be the one thing that is eluding us.

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue.

The Zeo Personal Sleep Coach is looking to be the answer to our sleep issues, outside of medical problems. Zeo co-founder and CTO Ben Rubin sits down with GeekDad to talk about the Zeo, the technology behind it and about how important sleep should be to us, and what we can do to make it as important as it should be.

Wow. That doesn't look posed at all.

Are you getting a good nights sleep? In our harried lives, full of technology and staying up late playing WoW, a proper nights sleep may be the one thing that is eluding us. We spend our days groggy, tired and sluggish from start to finish. Well, maybe we all don’t. Maybe some of us know when to cut off the Xbox and head for bed. I certainly don’t and struggle with sleep problems – not related any medical issues. Too much caffeine, lack of proper exercise and eating habits all contribute to sleep issues. My problem is the caffeine and nicotine. So outside of visiting a sleep lab, how do I know how I’m sleeping? Not only that, but how can I fix it?

That may all sound like pandering, but it’s stuff I’ve been wondering about for a long time. While my doctor tells me to visit a sleep lab, I’ve noticed that when I change my habits and pay attention to how I’m living my life, I sleep better. My mind gets the rest it needs so I’m sharp at work the next day, and my body gets the rest it needs so I can beat my high score on Wii Bowling. So then, I was sent the Zeo Personal Sleep coach. Now I’m as skeptical as you would expect me to be, so all I saw at first was a nifty looking clock and a “sleep coach” gimmick attached to it. I thought, “how in the hell can this tell me how I’m sleeping? How?” Stop drinking Mountain Dew after 7pm. Problem solved right?

Well, life is never that easy. Using the Zeo however, is. Again, I spent the first couple nights using it thinking it was a gimmick. This was stuck in my cynical little head. There is this headband you put on that transmits data to the device to track your sleep pattern in four phases; wake, light, deep & REM sleep. Then in the morning it gives you a total “Z Score” and the time spent in each phase. You track this information on a chart, and enter it on the website (via an included SD card) to receive coaching advice on your sleep habits. It asks the obvious questions of course, if you drank booze before bed, did you wind down, caffeine, turning off your mind and so on. Still though, I was skeptical. How was this headband telling me how I slept? And for that matter, what could their coaching do about it?

So since I was asking all these skeptical questions and wondering how accurate the Zeo is, I decided to ask someone that might know something about how the damn thing works and what it’s supposed to do and help you do. That person is Ben Rubin, CTO and co-founder of Zeo. Ben started the company in 2003 with two other co-founders while they were juniors in college at Brown. That’s right, some genius boys sitting around talking about tracking sleep patterns. I talked to Ben via Skype about the Zeo, the technology behind it and about how important sleep should be to us, and what we can do to make it as important as it should be.

GeekDad: So how did the idea come about, and long did it take from inception to completion?

Ben Rubin: “We were juniors in college at the time, at Brown, and we had heard – it’s interesting, this is a theme that a lot of people have heard but not acted upon – that if you wake up at the right time in your sleep phase, you feel more refreshed. The product has sort of shifted, but that’s where it started. My role at the time, I was brought in as the first engineer on the team that might be able to build it. So it was a couple of guys sitting around a kitchen table after class or in the evening thinking about waking up optimally or feeling more refreshed, and they looked to me and said Ben, how do we build this thing? The famous words that I eat kind of continuously, I said I can have this done by the end of Christmas break – this was in September 2003 – and it took a solid 4 1/2 years from conception to launch.”

GD: So what was the next step in your hunt to track sleep?

Rubin: “If you actually look at how someone can feel refreshed in the morning, you want to know their REM sleep, deep sleep, their light sleep and you’re able to map the optimal wake up time within a certain window. So when we were students we really just designed this for the first time, we asked professors at Brown and Harvard, how do you measure the sleep stage at home? They said, you can’t. The way that you measure sleep stage is you go into the lab, you put 20 electrodes on your head and you get that record read over the course of the night by a professional. If you want real sleep stage, you have to go into the lab. So we ignored their good advice, and said we’re going to find a way to do this anyway.

“We went looking around for materials, and found a silver fabric that at that time was being used in the military as a wound dressing because it silver has micro-biotic properties. We found that if you put this silver fabric on the forehead, we were actually able to get some reasonable brain waves out of it. It had some artifact, it was noisy, it wasn’t what you would use in a sleep lab but it was just what you needed – for a consumer – to show sleep phases at home. So that was really the technology breakthrough that enabled us to build Zeo.”

GD: So basically, the silver enabled you to create the at-home sleep lab effect of the Zeo, is that the general idea?

Rubin: “The idea is that we are actually tracking and measuring your sleep, it’s like a little sleep lab in your home. It shows you your sleep phases throughout the night, how much deep sleep, how much REM sleep which is important for memory restoration, deep for body restoration. We take that information and give you coaching advice and guidance and hopefully lead you towards a better nights rest.”

GD: So are we getting enough sleep? Probably not huh?

Rubin: “The reality is that most of us are not getting any where near the sleep that we should. We just published a neat info-graphic that shows the top reasons why you should be getting a proper nights sleep. And there are just shocking facts, like if you spend an hour or more sleeping a day you would lose on average 14 pounds per year. If you sleep less than six hours a night you at a higher risk for heart disease and so on. Most people don’t feel like they are in control of their sleep, they feel like it’s a part of their health they can’t really care for. With Zeo, we are trying to give you that control over your sleep through the data, and through coaching.”

“When people deprive themselves of sleep, they are depriving of REM sleep (because deep sleep comes in the beginning of the sleep cycle.) REM is highly tied into memory consolidation and mental restoration that you really want, especially if you are an active professional.”

GD: About 15 – 20 years ago, you mention using brainwaves to track anything and you’d probably spook the hell out of people. The technology wasn’t anywhere near considering brain waves as a measurement device outside of a medical office. However, that’s no longer the case is it?

Rubin: “Zeo uses brain waves for the first time in a consumer application. When we started thinking about this product in 2003, I’m pretty sure there was no consumer product using brain waves. Brain waves are really medical technology, you would use it for seizure detection, sleep studies, and that because brain waves weren’t accessible to a consumer from a technology perspective.”

GD: Why not? Wasn’t the tech moving in that direction anyway?

Rubin: “It was too costly. If you go to a lab they hook you up to electrodes and so on. The intrinsic thought is you can’t really do that in the consumer world. But we looked back 20 years ago, it was the same thing with heart rate. Back in the 70’s and 80’s you couldn’t get your heart rate at home – that was medical technology. Then Polar came around and started giving you heart rate and helping you train for sports with small sensors. We figured, it might be time for that kind of thinking with brain waves. And brain waves are 10 to 100 times smaller than heart rate signals – they are a bit more temperamental and harder to interpret – but we now have the technology in electronics in sensors and signal processing to do that.”

GD: Talk a bit more about the tech, how exactly does silver transmit brain waves, and how does the Zeo know what to do with them? Frankly, I thought it worked through muscle movement – a simple assumption I know.

Rubin: “It starts with small silver sensors, which are conductive, coated over fabric. That silver conducts your brain wave activity into an electronics module, for signal processing and application. Brain waves are about five to 75 micro volts and have to be amplified 5000 times to be read. That raw brain wave information is transmitted via wireless to the bedside display. The bedside display does the algorithmic signal processing using a neural net.”

GD: Hold on, a neural net? Like, this thing is running on some A.I.?

Rubin: Yes. The neural net is a form of artificial intelligence. What we did to train this algorithm is that we put the Zeo band on someone’s head, then we gave them the full 20 electrode polysomnograph, which is the medical tech to stage sleep, then we told the neural net to learn how the human is sleeping using the 20 electrodes and translating it to the one silver headband. We collected data from students and a few reluctant professors. We then validated the tech medically in a number of publications showing that the Zeo is equivalent to a polysomnograph for in home sleep technology.

“One of the challenges was making it consumer friendly. It’s relatively easy getting it working the first time, but harder to get it working on a consistent basis. We spent years developing the headband and making sure the software was reliable.”

GD: Not to go too much science fiction on you, but at what point do we begin receive brain waves back from some sort of device, that would modify our brain waves and behavior?

Rubin: “It’s not that science fiction. I have sitting next to me a device from Fisher Wallace Laboratories. It’s a medical device, not a consumer product, but you literally slap these two electrodes on your forehead and it will apply a current at a certain frequency across your frontal lobe and the things that they claim are everything that depression symptoms are alleviated to sleep quality is improved. So it’s not science fiction anymore. Increasingly it’ll be moving towards consumer use. Zeo is just passively looking at your brain waves and giving you sleep advice, but the active modification of brain waves is something that is being actively researched right now, that’s what we’re moving towards.”

GD: What about some of the other products on the market that purport to be able to track sleep?

Rubin: “There are a couple of products on the market that track sleep in a different way. Rudimentary. There is an iPhone app called ‘Sleep Cycle.’ Stick it next to your head, it just measures motion. There are a couple wrist band products – like Wake Mate, which operates through actigraphy. There has been a lot of confusion between what we’re doing and actigraphy. We’re using brain waves, muscle tone & eye movement. We’ve validated the technology scientifically. By contrast, actigraphy just measures sleep and wake. It’s not able to measure the sleep stages, and has low accuracy. This tech has a place, but it’s very different from having a Zeo which behaves more like a personal sleep lab.”

GD: So some final words on how we’re sleeping, as a society?

Rubin: “We’re so sleep deprived as a society, you’ll hear people saying ‘oh I have no problem sleeping, I fall asleep at the drop of a dime.’ What I say to those people is if you are falling asleep immediately, it means you are massively sleep deprived. It should take you 10 -15 minutes to fall asleep normally.

“We think Zeo is part of a much larger trend, we now have the tools, from sensors to wireless connections, to internet software that allows you to measure things about your body in a rather seamless way. Sleep is a huge component to Zeo, but there are other companies working on everything from activity tracking, to stress tracking to using cameras to track your emotions and all this is coming together to be able to track your health.”

So you probably want to know, does this thing work? Sure. Does it show me how long I’m spending in deep sleep, REM sleep and light sleep? You’re damn straight it is. Is it helping me manage how I sleep by using the “smart wake” function that wakes you at the optimal time, rather than at a set time each day – yes. Is the coaching and analysis of my sleep patterns helping me make smart decisions about my life spent sleeping? Yes, although a lot of it is stuff that should be obvious to me. But that’s the way it is sometimes isn’t it? Sometimes we need someone else to tell us what we already know, to make us change for the better. Now, I’m gonna go take a nap.